“Creative accounting,” said Warren Buffett’s right-hand man Charlie Munger, “is an absolute curse to a civilization.”
I mention this because our nation was certainly cursed by creative accountancy on Thursday, March 18, 2010. On that date, a date which will live in fiscal infamy, the “nonpartisan” Congressional Budget Office (CBO) updated its scoring of a then-moribund ObamaCare bill by claiming that it’d reduce the federal deficit by $138 billion over 10 years.
Yeah, right.
As Sally Pipes noted later that year in her prescient book The Truth About Obamacare, that CBO score was all the air cover that a group of 50-odd Democrat holdouts needed to jump aboard the ObamaCare train and saddle future generations of Americans with even more debt.
Americans are an enterprising sort — usually for better, but often for worse. Like James Madison, we can’t undertake to lay our fingers upon that article of the Constitution which grants Congress the right to print money and dole out goodies, but we can sure as heck figure out a way to cheat a flawed system being run by disinterested careerists.
Such has been the case with ObamaCare since its inception, and the Trump administration is finally standing athwart the train track to financial ruin and yelling, Stop!
“Trump Officials Eject 750,000 From Obamacare Markets, Claiming Fraud,” reads the predictably dour headline from The New York Times.
In fact, what Vice President JD Vance and his fellow fraud fighters have done is remove 750,000 ObamaCare enrollees (the number is closer to 760,000, but who’s counting?) who are either fake or don’t qualify for these particular objects of beneficence. Said Vance, “We’re actually making sure that the people receiving ObamaCare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them.”
As the Times reports, “The announcement was the latest initiative by an anti-fraud task force Mr. Vance leads that has often turned its efforts toward federal health programs. In recent months, the task force has been involved in withholding billions in Medicaid funding from Minnesota and California, contending that the states had not adequately combated fraud.”
That the Trump administration has “turned its efforts toward federal health programs” makes perfect sense. Indeed, it reminds me of what Willie Sutton deadpanned when asked why he robs banks: because that’s where the money is.
Who could possibly take issue with fighting Medicaid fraud and ensuring that only real and needy people are getting it, right?
Oh, wait: “The Trump Administration’s shameless decision to rip away health insurance from thousands will leave working families unable to get the care they need,” said some young leftist who handles Nancy Pelosi’s X account, while also adding, “Using the false pretext of fighting fraud to strip Americans of their healthcare is as cynical as it is cruel.”
For context, as the Appropriated Press reports, “Roughly 19.2 million Americans are actively enrolled in ACA marketplace health plans as of early 2026,” adding, “The number of enrollees grew during the COVID-19 pandemic when enhanced subsidies became available through the American Rescue Plan Act and Inflation Reduction Act, both signed into law by former President Joe Biden.”
Whenever you see a euphemism like “enhanced subsidies,” your temples should throb and your wallet should start smoking.
But instead of congratulating the Trump administration for having saved the American taxpayer untold billions going forward, all the AP can do is kvetch about how the administration wasn’t transparent enough in its fraud-fighting methods. (Here’s an idea: How about we keep the fraudsters guessing as to sources and methods? Otherwise, they’ll simply modify their approach and move to the next hole in this costly game of Whac-a-Mole.)
No doubt, though, the administration is taking advantage of artificial intelligence — or as Donald Trump has now rebranded it, “super intelligence.” Which is no doubt why, as I mentioned earlier this week, the Democrats have all of a sudden embraced their inner Luddite and are now demanding we slam on the AI brakes — because their real concern isn’t AI Armageddon; it’s that AI is now being turned loose on their bread and butter, on the fraud that’s rampant throughout our institutions, including our gargantuan Medicaid program.
Oh, the Democrats say they take fraud seriously — but only because they have to say it. And they’ll claim that they’ve been fighting fraud. But as The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board points out, “The Government Accountability Office reported last December that 23 of 24 applications it had created for fictional people were approved by the federal exchange. The auditor also found that more than 29,000 Social Security numbers in 2023 and nearly 68,000 in 2024 were used to obtain more than one year’s worth of coverage in a single year. That suggests identity fraud.”
Fighting fraud wasn’t always a partisan battle. Indeed, a fraud-fighting bill is there for the passing, if only Democrats would take Republicans up on it.
“Once upon a time,” the Journal’s editors add, “in a less polarized Washington, policing government fraud was bipartisan. No more. Democrats are portraying the Trump Administration’s [efforts] as throwing cancer patients off a cliff.”
Vance says this particular fraud-fighting measure will save the government around $2.2 billion for starters. Of course, we’re $40 trillion in debt, but a few billion here and a few billion there, and pretty soon we’re talking about real reform.
